First of all, the anti-gravity shit is out. When you’re at your station you would need to be strapped in.
Secondly, no extraneous pieces of the craft joined by pillars or columns. The craft would resemble a long tube.
Third, I doubt any weapons would be required.
What else would make sense in a real 23rd century starship?
Some sort of continuous thrust technology would be my best guess. Not a chemical rocket, but maybe some sort of fusion or fission drive, possibly using some sort of exotic power source as yet unknown, and possibly using something really radical that can bend or warp spacetime…compress it in front and expand it in back. If you had a continuous thrust rocket you WOULD have artificial gee, btw…not anti-gravity, but still pretty good.
Other than that, I’m guessing the controls would be further extensions of the ‘glass cockpit’ concept, but possibly holographic or some other type of projection technology that would take up even less weight and space than today’s controls…maybe completely virtual and directly connected to the users mind and body. Possibly there would be some sort of life extension or suspended animation technology as well…maybe something like being in the Matrix (i.e. a virtual world) where the crew could be cocooned in a life support system yet interact as if they were walking about on the ship (I wrote a short story along these lines a few years ago), and where their body functions could be slowed and time compressed or expanded as required for the trip…i.e. the thought processes slowed significantly while to the astronaut it seems perfectly normal speed. Or vice versa as required by emergencies onboard.
-XT
Not necessarily. For example, you might want a long column to keep your highly radioactive engine away from the crew compartment. Or you might have highly sensitive instruments you want out on a spar away from interference from the main body of the ship. Or your ship might be some variant on an Orion drive, in which case you’ll want shock absorbers between the crew compartment and the pusher plate.
No idea. I don’t know crap about physics other than the very basic stuff I learned in college. And our understanding of physics will be far more advaned by then. That is like someone in 1800 asking what chemistry will be like in the 21st century. Maybe. I don’t know. I am under the impression physicists have ‘mostly’ figured stuff out in their field aside from a few stragglers (god particle, unified theory, where the big bang came from, why gravity is weaker than other forces, is there a multiverse, etc). But I’m sure in 200 years they will know far more about the laws of the universe and how to bend them. We just recently invented materials that can divert visible light and create invisibility cloaks. I have no idea if they could do that with mass (to make something near weightless so it requires almost no thrust to move it forward). So who knows.
If the concept of creating tunnels through time and space ever turns out to be viable, I’m guessing it’ll work by doing that. A space ship that requires thrust in 3D spacetime would take forever to get to another solar system.
No crew.
Or, rather all crew stored as organic “goo” and stored personalities on a computer.
If needed, a human body would be “run off”, & the correct persona downloaded into it.
If its going to be built in space, we can ignore little things like aerodynamics. I’m picturing something like a Borg Cube
Why not? There may be very good reasons for having seemingly extraneous spacecraft extensions:
Stargates sent to distant star systems unmanned then once arrived at the desired star system it would active and allow 2 way instantaneously passage for manned vehicles. These would be probably some crude industrial design.
Hoping for some sort of space warp tech to get it there fast, but perhaps solar/laser sails at first then stellar sail to decelerate.
The manned ship could be something like a advanced space plane. Just needed the ability to takeoff orbit and land (or splashdown), and repeat for the return without infrastructure on the far end.
Perhaps if we are really good we will get a probability drive.
Carrying along: how would a nuclear reactor propel a spaceship?
In submarines the reactor heats water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which turns a shaft, which drives a propeller. How does this work in space?
The nuclear reactor heats some propellant in a chamber, which expands rapidly and exits through a nozzle. This works like any other rocket.
Alternately, you could use the reactor to generate electricity (either via turbine or some thermoelectric effect). You could then use the electricity to accelerate ionized gas.
Either way, you need to carry some kind of propellant. There’s no such thing as a space drive that is both entirely self contained and doesn’t lose mass (one might quibble about photon drives, but in the end they still lose mass).
Oh, there’s scads of ideas. A simple one is to simply vent the steam to space as a rocket. Another is to use nuclear warheads as a pulse drive; the Orion drive I mentioned. There’s also the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSR) idea, which uses water containing a uranium salt as fuel and creates in essence a small continuous nuclear explosion. And different variations of gas core drives where the nuclear fuel is as the name implies gaseous.